thefutureisred

What's In the Traveler's Handbag?

I've never been the neat handbag type.

Business cards, old receipts, things Lila hands to me, things I want to keep but don't know what to do with them, they all eventually end up at the bottom or in the numerous pockets of my bag. Some things are useful. Others, junk. And some are mementos, things I don't really need, but can't bring myself to throw away. Yet.

Before every major trip, though, I clean and organize. I like to think of it as a testament to the need to move on.

This time, my bag --  which triples as handbag, computer bag and carry on -- has been through a lot. It began with us in Salta beginning of July. We made our way through Cordoba, Neuquen and skiing San Martin de los Andes. Then Atlanta, Burning Man, where my bag arrived to find itself smack in the middle of a dust storm, and finally two overnight drives from Atlanta to NYC and back.

What did I find?

Zipties

These little things are endlessly useful for Burning Man. From attaching tarp to poles for a shade structure, to securing your tent, connecting a cup handle to utility belt, bondage classes and excellent for tying, securing or binding just about anything. Very handy.

Now that I'm no longer at Burning Man, I still use them in dozens of situations. Bracelets for Lila, collars for her stuffed kitty -- which honestly, is so tight, it seems to border on bondage as well. Quick suitcase fixes, holding computer cables and so much more.

Half Eaten String Cheese, Still In Wrapper

I'm not proud. I guess it ended up here somewhere between Harrisburg and Roanoke, but this isn't the first time I've found food remains festering here.

Balloons

I carry these just about everywhere, always. Not so much for Burning Man, because I figured a burst balloon will likely end up in pieces all over the playa, but as a toy. Blow one up and Lila is occupied for hours. They're also great when playing with a group of kids, because their floaty, bouncy ways ensure that all children playing have a chance at the ball.

Bike Cover In Ziplock

Another prop from Burning Man. I got mine at Black Rock Bicycles, where we rented our bikes. The owner's wife makes them. Mine is purple on top with a many colored tie-dyed edge. It's still filthy from dust storms, and there's an inch of playa dust at the bottom of the bag which oddly makes me wax nostalgic. How quickly a girl forgets how corrosive such dust can be.

Two Pairs Of Underwear.

One Lila's. One mine. Both clean. Because you never know when you'll need them.

Yes, those are my Top Five. Three of which, I'll continue to keep in my bag. Can you guess which ones?

The others, I'm sure, will somehow find their way back, along with incense, a bike lock, jeweled heart and butterfly stickers, candles, ski lift ticket, a few rocks, seeds, leaves from various trees and a pack of two inch nails.

I go through this every time we pack.  It's the constant winnowing of what is important enough to carry along, what must be thrown out and what must be left behind. This process is enormous, overwhelming the first time you do it. Over time, though, it gets easier, and eventually, you find you just won't feel right unless you've lightened your load. After all, do you really want to carry a sleeping bag cover and hammer along for the ride?

This time, I'll admit, has been much harder than in the past. I don't want to leave Atlanta, although I do want to return to our adventure in Salta. Here, we have family, contacts, connections. There, we have a new project, a summer of camping in some of the most beautiful terrain on the planet, and plenty I have yet to uncover.

Photo courtesy of Valerie Renee's Flickrstream

How Burning Man Changed Everything

This is not a gathering of drunk, dazed hippies as so many seem to think. Instead, I met teachers, artists, nurses, computer technicians and writers. I met a woman who came to recharge before starting chemotherapy. I did yoga in the cool morning hours with a yogi who juggles fire. I ran into a Greek photographer I'd emailed through Couchsurfing, but never had a chance to meet until I walked into our camp the first day and recognized his face and name.

The people inspired me.

But it's not just individuals, it's the community. Here is a place where taking a cake to your neighbors to say hello is not just something you do on move in day or on holidays, it's something you do many times, daily. Your share everything, and everything is shared with you. You give your food, your water and you give of your daily life in a way that rarely happens in the rest of the world.

I found myself often engaged in conversations with strangers on subjects I usually consider to be private, generally meant only for a few close friends and family. Here, in this stage, I opened up.  I expressed things I didn't even know about myself until I found myself telling someone I just met and would never see again.

Thus, the walls that exist between people in general society dissipate. Here in this sudden city, you experience tribal living. You exist in science fiction. You expand into another dimension, if only for a week. It's a world in which wearing jeans and a t-shirt makes you strange but walking around naked is normal.

It is incredibly liberating to be free of the boundaries of world outside of Burning Man, otherwise known as the default world. This frees you, not because you necessarily want to become a nudist, but because it turns the world upside down, demanding that you question why we make the choices we make in the default world.

It is simply put, fan-bloody-tastic. I spent more of my time riding a bike around the playa seeing the art than anything else. This is the largest, most accessible art museum on the planet. It's open day and night, and the art is interactive. Some you can climb. Others are designed to react to your presence, often responding by spewing out flames. One evening, I saw a woman dressed all in white, hanging from a flaming metal bird sculpture. I sat in a chair that amplified my heartbeat. And after some time, everything in this temporary existence becomes art, even yourself.

It makes you see the world in a way you've never seen it before. It makes you want to step beyond the role of spectator and become truly engaged and involved. You begin to believe that anything is possible.

I know many leave the playa to find themselves feeling lonely and disassociated. I can understand why. The separation from such intensity can be painful.

Me? When I dream I go back to Burning Man. I find myself surrounded by swirling dust. I can wear what I want, be who I want. And when I wake from my dreams -- day or night -- I cannot help but bring at least a bit of the dust back into the default world.

The lines between Burning Man world and Real Life blur, and that, I think, is exactly how it should be.

The Best Part Of the Great American Road Trip

The Atlanta-NY drive is a tough one, particularly without stopping for the night. What keeps me going? Knowing that we'll be stopping for breakfast. Each section of this country has its particular roadside stops. Here, it's Cracker Barrell, Perkins and Waffle House. All the fireworks vendors were shut last night, as was Abbots Farms where you can purchase Jellies. Peaches. Salsas. They have free samples too but not at 3am. So we made do with the enormous breakfast platters at The Barrell then browsed the likes of Boston Baked Beans, singing fish and a parrot that repeats everything you say twice as fast and in twice as high a pitch. Don't forget the rocking chairs out front and all the Halloween and Thanksgiving gear inside. Noah likes to complain about the police. "They're just here to make money through bogus tickets, he rants. "When do you see them going into bad neighborhoods to help people?" How often is Noah in bad neighborhoods to see what the police do there? We are, after all, just passing through. At some point, generally when some poor motorist has been stopped by Smokey, as Noah affectionately calls them, he starts singing Rage Against the Machine with a twist. "Pigs On Parade." Lila serenades us with off-key La-La-Las, some squeaks and giggles. "Wheeeee-Boom!" She's the only one who really slept last night. Then we stop at Perkins for more coffee and somehow end up with six muffins and two cookies on their buy 2 get forty free deal. This is our way, the American Way, and I wouldn't trade it or the rolling green hills and spacious sky for anything.

Night Waffle House

We're switching off every 100 miles, giving the other a chance to sleep. We want to make it to the Upper West Side by noon. I'd just finished my shift with a stop at Waffle House, with its usual brown-yellow interior and dead-eyed waitresses. Eyes dead, yes, but they're nice, nice, nice. Bambi took my triple order of hash browns smothered and covered with a smile, called me sweetheart, and Connie wished everyone she saw a blessed good night.

An older woman at the counter burned through three cigarettes in the time it took for me to order and visit the women's room, started on her fourth as she asked for a steak with baked potatoe, no baked potatoes. She changed her order over another two smokes.

Up north, the people here would be seen as slow, maybe plain ol' dumb. Here, you know it's just the south being southern. No rush, everything arrives with a twang and a slow late blooming smile. I hated this about the South growing up here. I have learned to appreciate it.

Now we're in the dark on 85, just by Billy Graham Parkway. I'm not sure I'm ready to match the New York City beat. Sureness, though, is irrelevant. We go where we go. Now, to sleep.

Welcome Home, Burning Man! Welcome Home?

I've been writing home for as long as I can remember. 

My first really big project developed itself into a discourse on the nature of home. Winter, senior year of college, my best friend Jen and I drove cross country to explore Native American culture in the United States, mostly focused on the Lakota Sioux, also known as Oglala, in South Dakota. I came away from that project clearly seeing how so many Native Americans consider this land their home, yet they have been displaced from it. I am the opposite. I have not been forcibly moved, and yet my connection to the United States is far more tenuous.

So upon first entering Black Rock City to hear the warm greeting of "Welcome Home!" I was discomfited. It felt strange, wrong. "This is not home," I told them silently.

No place is really home to me.

Brooklyn? It once was home, but I don't feel that way anymore. South Africa? I don't even remember it. Atlanta? My parents sold the house I grew up in almost a decade ago, and while I feel entirely comfortable in their house, it doesn't feel like home to me. Panama? No. South of France? Gorgeous, but not home.

In a sense, Noah, Lila and I attempt to create our home in Salta, but I suspect no where will ever have the weight and permanence of what I think home should have. Perhaps that's why travel comes so easily to me. I don't feel sad when I leave a place because for me leaving is as inevitable an event as arriving.

But staying, relaxing, creating a place, one place that is no longer an apartment, la casa or even a tent, but is regardless of brick and mortar, independent of form and furniture, a place I feel safe calling home, that has eluded me thus far.

I suspect I'm not interested in having a real home.

I like flitting around, a couple months here, a few days there. So on the eve of our return to Salta, I find myself apprehensive. We plan to go back, rent a house for a couple years (yes, years!), work, live life. And so you know, we decided to stay in Salta -- aside from it being a lovely place to live -- when Lila told us she didn't want to move around anymore. "Why do we keep going places and not staying," she asked. So it was time to be still for a while.

I'm finding the prospect of creating one place as home, becoming an expat instead of a traveler, as difficult and overwhelming as the process of selling everything and packing up to go. It's Newton's Law of Motion applied to travel. A body at rest prefers to remain at rest, and a body in motion, well, you know how it goes.

Yesterday, I asked Lila where she calls home.

She points straight down to the ground. "Right here," she told me. Right in Granny and Grandpa's house. She is also excited to go back to Salta, to return to school and see her friends and teachers.

I find great satisfaction in the thought that somehow, we have created a life for Lila in which she has a space to call her own. Maybe more than one even.

Photo courtesy of eyesplash's flickrstream

September 11th, Eight Years On

Shortly before leaving NY, I attended a lecture on Sanskrit goddess texts. The main subject: how to find your soul mate.The people giving the lecture, whose names and information I cannot for the life of me remember now, were living somewhere deep in the mountains in Asia. Far away from phones, e-mail, everything. They didn't hear about the September 11th attacks until six months after they occurred.

Seems unfathomable to those of us in the eye of that particular storm. It makes me realize how much happens on this enormous planet that escapes detection. Often, if it's not happening to you (or me), it's almost as if it's not happening at all.

September 11, 2001 seems so incredibly far away right now. The life I lived in NYC is gone. The people I know have changed. I am also different.

Still, it was the day everything changed, whether you knew it or not. In NY, the blind safety we felt walking down the street, flying on planes, sitting in a restaurant eating dinner with a friend, evaporated instantly. Soon after, a war began which lead to another, and the tendrils of this particular event reached out internationally.

For me, the day became a message to act now, to actualize my dreams, desires and goals without delay, because tomorrow may not exist.  I know many felt that bringing a child into such a world would be wrong. I felt if I was ever going to have a child, it needed to happen immediately. No more waiting, questioning, weighing and debating.

It showed me that New Yorkers are decent giving people who can support each other in extreme crisis, but somehow that gets all covered up when we're all so involved in our daily things. So be kind. Now. Give to others. Now. Don't wait for disaster to make it necessary.

It taught me that no place is without a doubt safe and calm. Nothing is perfect, and life can change in an instant, without warning. Just as picking up an entire life to travel is no more frightening or risky than staying in one place.

To all who have lost and were lost, my thoughts, blessings and love go out to you. We're all searching for our path through this world. Here's a wish that you find it if you haven't already.

Photo courtesy of Sister72's Flickrstream

First Impressions After Burning Man 2009

I'm not entirely sure where to start.

This Burning Man thing is huge. Tens of thousands of people. Endless things to do and see. Amazing art. And millions of minuscule grains of dust whirling in the desert.

I am exhausted.

Lack of sleep will do that to a body. So will biking around the desert for hours a day. I barely ate more than beef jerky the entire time we were there, and I seemed to have dropped five or so pounds. The skin around my eyes blasted raw from two days of dust storms, during one of which we broke camp, meaning hours and hours in the blazing sun working with dust in our eyes. I can't see two feet in front of me, but the sun still sneaks through the clouds to burn?

The good news, though, the bruises on my leg are healing well. One in particular I got when I ran my bike into a truck. I didn't see it until last minute because of the white out. Oh, and the massive cold sore on my lip, the one that got worse and worse as days passed because dry wind and sand generally aren't a solid prescription for healing.

Did I mention I'm exhausted?

Did I also mention that Burning Man was amazing, overwhelming and even with all the exhaustion I wouldn't trade the experience for anything. In fact, I plan to buy tickets for Burning Man 2010 as soon as they go on sale. Of course, whether or not I go depends on lots of other things.I can always sell the tickets later, but I want the option of going should I so choose.

While my body is tired, my mind, creativity and spirituality are awake and rejuvenated.

I spent much of my time riding through the desert looking at art. Burning Man is the most fantastic art museum on the planet It remains open day and night, and it is interactive. You can drive under and around the art. Some you can climb. Others you can write on. Some breathe fire.

The rest of my time I spent with friends.I knew only a handful of people when I arrived. When I left, I had made connections and friendships that formed with the intensity of those that form in camp when you're a kid. They're fast and pure. You feel you know each other well because you're in close quarters, you see each other daily and you're dependent on each other to survive.

We played a lot. Danced, rode our bikes, teased each other.I didn't check my phone once. It wouldn't have worked anyway. No signal. My blackberry slept quietly, covered and protected from dust zipped in a pocket of my bag that had been placed in another plastic bag and hidden at the back of a truck. I didn't miss the outside world -- with the exception of Lila -- I didn't worry.

Did you hear that? I didn't worry about a single thing the entire week.

I went to yoga classes, energy healing massages. Noah and I joined a couples stretching workshop, and I tried out a pole dancing class. There was plenty else as well. And yes, all the rumors of sex and drugs are true. Naked people, men wearing tutus and wigs, women dressed as leprechauns, dazed people wandering aimlessly and dangerously in the desert completely incoherent from acid.

Much like the Indian proverb of the wise men and the elephant, this beast is too big to know and understand in its entirety. You lay on your hands and feel what you do, perhaps blindly, then take away what you want.

Quite a gift, really.